


when your number isn't up

by blxcksqvadron



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Din Djarin Needs a Hug, Grief/Mourning, Head Injury, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:08:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28422951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blxcksqvadron/pseuds/blxcksqvadron
Summary: mando gets a ride back to tatooine. set post-s2.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Cobb Vanth
Comments: 17
Kudos: 105
Collections: Covert Discord New Years Fic Exchange





	when your number isn't up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GuenVanHelsing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GuenVanHelsing/gifts).



> a holiday gift for ms. cakes! also a little fanart at the bottom because i wasn't sure how long the story was going to end up (;ω;)

> **Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare  
> ** **The lone and level sands stretch far away**   
>  _ \- Ozymandias _ , Percy Bysshe Shelley

> **'Cause there are no more left like you**   
>  _ \- Urantia _ ,  Deftones

  
  


* * *

“It’s just one thing after another with you, ain’t it.” Peli squinted against the shine of Din’s armour and tugged her gloves off with her teeth. The gaggle of pit droids stood at the edge of his shadow, peeking over one another’s heads at the ship parked behind the Mandalorian, and at the Mandalorian behind the Mandalorian. “Listen, I like you, Mando. But I don’t want any trouble.” She jutted her chin in Fett’s direction. “I seen that armour before. Jabba the Hutt’s long dead, pal.”   
“I know. Shame I couldn’t pull the trigger myself.”    
The second set of Slave I’s shadows melted into the first.   
“His gang still run the Dune Sea. I get the impression, then, that you’re not here to reminisce about the good old days, are ya.”   
“Not exactly.” There was a lilt in his voice that suggested a smile behind the visor.   
“Hmm. All right.” Peli looked back at Din. “Hey, where’s the kid?”   
It was not a terrible question, but one he would be expected to answer for every friend he had made in this whole sorry adventure, and it made Din’s heart crawl up behind his teeth.   
“He’s safe,” he mumbled, and then, because it had been too long a pause, “he’s with his... people.”   
“Ah.” Peli’s mouth drew into a hard line; she slapped Din’s arm affectionately. “Well, he’ll have to come visit.”    
Din blinked hard under the helmet, straightened up. 

“I’d like if you could lend me a speeder one more time. Got some unfinished business of my own.”   
“Anything you need.” Peli gestured to Slave I. “Well, almost– plenty of parts on order if I don’t have ‘em on hand, you don’t see too many of those old birds come through here.”   
“She’s fine,” Boba interjected, “just dropping off our friend here.”   
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged, and turned to face Din directly. “Speeder’s in the front hangar. Try not to give it an acid bath this time.”

  
  


Tatoo II slipped past its twin as the speeder kicked across the empty desert, fine sprays of dust whipping at Din’s toes. The dirt track warped in the high noon heat. It had taken a little under two days’ ride to reach Mos Pelgo the first time, but that had been because the kid needed to eat and toilet, and stretch his little legs. So maybe he’d make it in one, he wondered, gripping the handlebars too tightly. 

The second sun set, and the Mandalorian kept riding as the earth turned blue around him. The first moon rose, and the Mandalorian let the wind push the speeder’s nose more than he should have. The third moon rose, and the Mandalorian listed sideways into a sandbank. 

If Din Djarin believed in luck, he would have wondered when his own had run out all over again. Instead, he rolled onto his back and lay very still. The speeder engine ticked as it cooled. He took his helmet off and let the stars slip in and out of his vision; adjusting to the light of a thousand-thousand waypoints, he let himself have a moment of curiosity. Where, in the guts of the galaxy, did the Jedi who came to his aid call home? It felt distanced enough from asking  _ where is my son _ that he indulged it longer. Something rustled almost out of earshot; footsteps, smaller than human. A tempo of four in the scrub along the track,  _ pat pat pat pat _ . A reflexive urge to put on his helmet came and went in the space of a breath. Din sat upright and shook the sand out of his gauntlets, scrubbed his hair and felt grit and grain slip below the edge of his cowl. His shoulders slumped in defeat.    
  


  
Excavating the speeder was quick work under moonlight, though the wind picked up as he thumped gravel out of the repulsor. It left a cold itch across his cheeks, making his eyes water and sticking like chalk in the tear-tracks, but it felt— revelatory. Good in the way that lancing a boil felt good. Is this what his Armourer had truly meant,  _ to be both hunter and prey _ ? Rumpled as a carcass in the wastes of Tatooine; reluctant heir to a throne of nothing; a clan halved; an ancestor of no-one. The bike croaked back to life and Din saw the long stretch of Jundland pass by with his own eyes, black to blue to red, and only put the helmet back on when he passed under the immense rock bridge that landed him in Tusken country and its hard-fought allyship. A pair of scouts with a retainer of massiffs watched as he pulled out of the long shadows of the Needles; there were truly so few Mandalorians on this planet that he was recognised near-instantly. Once, he had thought his Covert to be small.

At the far edge of the valley, the rock crumbled away to the ergs, and the road lost itself. The bike’s instruments flickered and spun, tricked this way and that by filaments in the sand, and Din cursed, condescended to by the suns he tried to navigate with. Even with Nevarro’s short cycles and delicate lava-beds, it had never felt this difficult to keep to a straight northward path. He braked hard at the peak of a tall dune and the speeder’s nose tipped forward before it lurched back. 

Sand, empty, endless. No crawler tracks that might have betrayed a Jawa’s fortress, no bantha droppings, no bones of a long-dead creature; only Din Djarin, alone, on a borrowed bike, at the edge of a silent sea, sentineled by twin suns. He folded his arms across the riser and tried very hard not to cry.    
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” It left his modulator as a hiss of grey noise.

If he believed in luck, he would have wondered if he’d ever had any to begin with. Instead, he watched a green-hot flare streak across the sky, a trail of crackling smoke leading to a point past the horizon line. Din briefly considered whether it was a trap, and then decided that a trap had better odds than staying put. As he drew closer to the marker, he found himself believing in—  _ something _ .

“Well, I sure-as-shit didn’t expect this.” Marshal Vanth shielded his eyes with his palm. He squinted into the approaching light. Din eased the brakes until the bike stopped a few paces ahead, and managed a short silence before an anxious mistrust overcame him.   
“How?”   
“Good to see you again, too, pal.”   
Din reached for his blaster. Vanth caught the movement and raised both hands, fingers splayed as a gesture of safety. Learned it from the Tuskens, maybe.   
“Easy, now.”   
“ _ Tell me how you found me _ .” A question, voiced as a demand. Vanth tapped the side of his head, his shoulder, his chest.   
“Got your suit to thank for that. I saw something shining from miles off, had no idea it was you ‘til just now. You get lost out there, Mando?”   
“No,” and then, “yes,” and then, “it doesn’t matter.” He sighed, letting the bike take his weight. “Thank you.”   
Vanth let out a low whistle between his teeth.   
“I’m gonna get you a drink.”

If Nevarro had been any indicator of what a place became in the Mandalorian’s wake, Mos Pelgo wasn’t too far behind. It was no means as busy as Mos Eisley, but since the Krayt dragon’s slaying and the subsequent peace between the Tuskens and settlers, the settlement had caught its breath. The street murmured with transports and livestock, no longer just a thoroughfare for the leviathan. Din parked his speeder next to what he supposed was the Marshal’s office, and followed Vanth inside.  _ Office _ was perhaps an overstatement; it had held equipment before the Mining Collective had been run out of town, and Vanth’s renovation had mostly involved putting in a couple of interior walls and the bare bones of a holding cell in one corner of the room.    
“Figured you’d want a little more privacy.” He leaned against his desk, a brick of repurposed wood and duracrete peppered with blaster cracks. Din hummed in agreement, the cool interior chilling his sweat under the beskar.    
“You live here?” He hoped it didn’t sound like an accusation.  
“Upstairs. It’s a fixer-upper, but,” Vanth shrugged, “beats shitting where you eat.” He tipped his head towards the cantina as casually as if he were simply cracking his neck.   
“You didn’t seem to mind it before.”   
“Yeah, well. I’m softer these days.” He grinned. “I’m glad that armour found its way home, but I admit I’m a little more nervous about getting sauced in the open now.”   
“Surprised to hear you’re on bad terms with anyone.” The corner of Din’s mouth twitched into an almost-smile.   
“I’d hate to be wrong.” Vanth opened a small cabinet next to the desk, removed two glasses and an unmarked bottle of dark liquor. “Aw, shit, wait.” He started to put the second glass back. “That’s on me, sorry. I’ll-”   
Din swallowed hard and reached out to catch Vanth’s arm. His tongue turned to dust.   
“It’s okay,” he said, although nothing came out. His brows knitted tight, gloved fingers digging into the bones in Vanth’s wrist. For his part, the Marshal stayed tamely still, breathing slow and even, looking past Din’s shoulder like a man caught handling a rockwart. No sudden movements, no noise. Patient. “It’s… fine.”    
Vanth raised an eyebrow, but otherwise remained calm. Din took a step backwards, boots scraping across the floor, and slowly removed his helmet. He held it in both hands in front of his chest, staring at the blank void of the visor’s glass. Vanth coughed quietly, hoping it masked his surprise.   
“That looks like it hurts.”

Din’s whole face burned. Tears threatened at the corners of his eyes, abjectly aware of being looked upon.    
“I’m just gonna…” Vanth delicately held Din’s jaw between his thumb and forefinger, turning his head an inch to the side. “Can’t you feel that?” He pushed a curly tuft of hair back. Din opened his mouth, words lodged in his throat. Vanth hadn’t even noticed, or was doing a very good job of pretending, until he touched the graze at Din’s temple, making him flinch. His elders would have punished him for showing weakness, he thought, that they would have excommunicated him for removing his helmet in front of another. If only they had not been slaughtered by a vestige of the Empire in their own foxhole.  _ Hunter and prey _ .  
“We’re gonna clean that up,” Vanth murmured, still not looking in Din’s eyes. 

The higher level of the Marshal’s building was considerably less ascetic than the ground floor. Din traced the patterned weave of the blanket on Vanth’s bed to distract himself from the press of damp cloth to his skin. For a moment he allowed himself to watch Vanth’s face as he concentrated; one eye closed, the tip of his tongue poking out between his teeth as he cut a thin strip of medpatch.   
“I’m no doctor, but I think that should do the job.”   
“I…” Din sighed, frowned. He’d had an easier time finishing sentences after being punched in the head a dozen times by a murder droid. Maybe the bike crash had been rougher than he’d realised. “You’re very generous, Marshal.”   
“Nothing to it.”    
Vanth gave an easy smile to a spot just behind Din’s ear, which began to flush pink. “Gotta say, I didn’t expect you to be so…”   
Din winced, gripping the quilt.    
“... handsome in there. If you don’t mind me saying.”   
He stared at the loose threads hanging from Vanth’s scarf. “Can’t say I’ve heard it before.”   
“I suppose not.”    
Vanth wiped a line clean of dust from the closer of Din’s pauldrons. “Mando, not that I’m not pleased to, uh, see you again…” He sat down on the bed, the movement gently pulling the blanket from Din’s hand. “What happened that brought you back up here? Where’s your  _ kid _ ?”    
“It’s… a long story.”   
“Well, I got all the time in the world for you, brother.”   
Din felt the sob start all the way in his toes.

The men finally sat in silence as the second moon streaked through the vents in the wall. Vanth downed his liquor and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve; the act of sharing was an intimacy Din had never imagined for himself, but most of the events of the last year had left him unsure of what was imaginable. The mouth of the bottle was warm, and the inside of the bottle was warm, and Vanth’s hand on his knee, steadying them both, was warmer still.   
“I heard rumours of Jedi here, once upon a time. That the Emperor’s man came from Mos Espa, even. Funny, how we’re just one little planet, all the way out here, but we’ve got no end of trouble.”   
Din had unwound enough to look Vanth in the eyes.   
“I didn’t know where else to go.”    
He sniffed, scratched his nose with the rough edge of his glove. “I don’t know what I’m doing any more. I… I feel like I spent all my life waiting for something to happen. And then it... happened.”   
“I get that.”    
Vanth rubbed the back of his neck, fingernail catching on the edge of the old scar Din knew hid under the scarf. “You’re so used to carrying the burdens of others that you don’t know what to do once you’re free.” He laughed quietly, not quite without mirth. “And then I went and ended up a damned sheriff, so I don’t know if I can give you a good answer.”   
Din looked down into the bottle, watched its contents swirl as he rolled it.   
“A diversion, then.” He stood up, and felt as spun as the liquor. “Please.”   
Vanth nodded slowly, took the bottle away with both hands; replaced them on Din’s shoulders. Din’s gaze hovered between the spot under Vanth’s eye, the crease of his brow, the corner of his mouth.   
“Wasn’t sure I read you right.”    
“Been told I’m hard to read.”   
“Not too hard.”    
Din pushed his hands under Vanth’s, and peeled off the cowl.   
“You sure this is all right? Bet we can figure out another way to-”   
“No,” Din interrupted. “This is the—— this is what I want.”    
Vanth guided Din back against the bed and crouched between his legs.    
“Let me give you a hand, then.” 

  
  
It was slow and considerate work, loosening every buckle and button and clasp and zipper until Din was entirely bare of boots and beskar. Vanth tugged each glove off with both hands and placed them in the neat pile accruing next to the bed. Din sat strangely small and entirely malleable, and whined low in his throat when Vanth’s fingertips slipped under the seam of his flightsuit. Sand caught under his nails.   
“I’m gonna take this off, now.”    
Din nodded, sweat beading and cooling along his hairline. His flightsuit felt altogether too tight. Vanth unzipped it in a single movement, never snagging the teeth or catching the fabric. He pushed it back from Din’s shoulders, thumbs tracing the line of his clavicle. Vanth’s beard tickled against Din’s throat, nose pressed into the curls behind his ear.   
“Mando-”   
“Din.”   
“ _ Din _ .” He spoke with his mouth flush against the skin. “If you want me to stop.”   
Din closed his eyes, swallowed. “You’ll know. Keep going.”    
Vanth touched his lips to Din’s jaw, a ghost of a kiss, and Din felt the grit scrape against his skin. He palmed his way into the seat of Din’s suit and curled his fingers around Din’s already-hard cock, felt the weight of it, velvet soft and slippery-hot. He cupped the back of Din’s head with his free hand, teasing a tuft of damp brown hair round and round with his thumb. It wasn’t firm enough to work into the tense muscle at the base of his skull, but Vanth felt Din’s shoulders drop nonetheless.    
“That’s it,” he purred, jacking him off slow and sloppy, no punishing grip or piston-like movement; just enough to keep Din out of his head while still in the room. “I got you, I got you.”    
Din didn’t last long, which he didn’t care enough about to know if it was a good or a bad thing, and came with a muffled shout into Vanth’s shirt. Vanth shook his scarf off and used it to clean up, and made a good effort at pretending to not be surprised by the relief-print of tears on his chest. Din was glowing and pliant; eyes puffy, vision watery, but present. The scratchy little beard he’d grown out began to itch. It seemed unfair that Vanth was still fully dressed, but his sleepy pawing was ineffectual.    
“Get some rest.” Vanth pulled his shirt off over his head and tossed it on the floor with markedly less care than he had extended to Din’s clothes; steered the blanket until it mostly came out from underneath Din and mostly draped over them both. As Vanth tucked himself behind Din, half-hard but undemanding against the small of his back, Din had the feeling he would have plenty to regret soon— at least concerning sleeping without an inch of space between a pair of bodies on an unforgivably hot planet. The rest could wait. The rest, for once, would wait.

* * *


End file.
